Baby Steps into the Chess World: My First Tournament

Looking happy during a match… probably just thrilled to have survived to the endgame!

It’s hard being motivated to play chess when your wife is so much better than you are. It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I had been the proud winner of the first and only Abbotsmead Junior School Chess Championship (admittedly mostly due to the fact that only around ten kids actually knew how to move the pieces…). I had then not really played again until my late twenties, but had pleasantly surprised myself by being competitive when I next played, in Suzhou, China, where a group of expats would meet for post-Saturday morning run chess in a local Starbucks. But nothing erodes confidence like what happened to me when I first met and played Turan.

The first time I played Turan was a few months after we had first met, in her flat in Shanghai. She played each move with barely a glance at the board, and then would go back to watching TV or playing on her phone while I stared at the board in with intense concentration. I calculated and schemed as hard as I possibly could, yet simply found myself losing pieces and position with almost every move. Helplessness swept over me with every piece she took, every threat she posed, and it just didn’t seem fair how easy it was for her. When I was finally checkmated, after perhaps 30 minutes of my time and about 30 seconds of hers, any motivation I had to play again had been drained out of me.

Inspired by the setting, attempting to play again on my birthday in Istanbul

The next time I braved a game with her was in Istanbul on my birthday. We chanced across a café with chess boards set up outside, and I was feeling happy and carefree in the morning sunshine so agreed to play. To set a realistic target, I figured we could play with a five-minute time control per person, and an agreement that the under / over was set at three. If Turan could beat me more than three times in 30 minutes, she won. If I got beat less than three times, she would win the challenge. As I was promptly checkmated in the first game with Turan having used less than a minute of her allotted time, I realised I might have miscalculated. Sure enough, 29 minutes later I had lost a grand total of six times!

After this experience, I gave up again. I was proud of Turan’s ability – it is inspiring to be around someone who truly excels at their craft. However, I couldn’t see any plausible reason for me to be playing her. We were so far apart in ability. When we travelled to my parents house for Christmas that year though, I saw an opportunity to show off Turan’s talent. First, we lined up three boards in front of her, with my Dad, my brother and me facing her. She promptly beat all three of us within seven minutes. As the one who had lasted the longest, my brother was then nominated to play Turan, with the catch that she would be blindfolded. Despite not being able to see the board, she again won convincingly.

Trying to improve, courtesy of tips from my friend, David

Over the next year, as Turan started playing more and more following our move to the UK, I found some motivation to try to play a bit again. As I improved a little with her advice, I nonetheless found it in some ways more frustrating as I got a bit better. The first time I was able to properly attack and could see a possible checkmate, hope swelled within me. But she easily swatted it aside and sure enough, a few moves later it was me who had been checkmated.

It's the hope that kills you. Trying to be a little more involved in Turan’s chess world, I recently started going to a social chess meetup at a local restaurant with her. Sometimes, I would be sure I had calculated right and that I would be able to force checkmate, only for my opponent to escape with a move I hadn’t seen, take pieces that I had overcommitted in the search for victory, and promptly subdue me. So it was that, low on confidence after such little success as a chess playing adult, I found myself playing my first ever chess tournament, a Rapidplay event with a time control of 15 minutes / 10 second increment, in Birmingham, as a way of accompanying Turan for part of two tournaments she was playing that weekend.

Tournament buildings can be imposing 😯

I arrived at the tournament as the only unrated player, drawing suspicion from the tournament director as I had entered in the Minor category. Afraid that I had concealed my actual rating to enter the lowest category and win the prize money, he quizzed me about my ability on arrival. He needn’t have worried – I was definitely not going to be troubling the podium. First up for me was a game against a kid of eight years old, with what I assumed must be a very lowly rating of 751 (players start ranked as 1,000, Turan is just over 2,000, Grandmasters will generally be 2,500+). I promptly left pieces hanging and found myself a knight and bishop down. Panicking, I looked around the hall and saw that of the thirty games going on in the Minor category, the others were all still very much in their opening phase. I couldn’t be the first to lose and stand up… against an eight year old! Trying to breathe deeply and stay calm, I took the only option available and pretended to think for a very, very long time.😂 Six minutes later, other boards were starting to get into the throes of a middle game and even have some drawing towards a conclusion, so I felt confident enough to finally make a move. I actually played ok from that point onward, getting my rooks well positioned on the central files and threatening to turn things around before finally being checkmated.

Every game after that seemed to follow a similar pattern. I would scrabble an ok position despite no knowledge of standard openings, do well in the mid-game, and then usually lose control late on after bungling attempts to force check mate. On one occasion I really messed it up – a knight and a bishop up, I made a complete hash of finishing my opponent off and ended up losing.

Snatching a bit of down time with Turan between games

But finally, a win came. My opponent matched me for incompetence, sacrificing his queen trying to force checkmate, but had mis-calculated, allowing me to escape. I still struggled to press my advantage, feeling stress building as he hung on and even threatened to come back, but I finally managed to queen a pawn to make winning inevitable. The elation was indescribable! I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Maybe I could become good at chess after all! By virtue of a bye in the next round, I gained another point in the tournament and some much-needed rest for my fried brain. I was feeling great when I sat down for my last game – I had climbed the rankings and was no longer playing every game on the bottom board. But then, of course, I was brought back to reality by another nine year old. I lost a rook to the ‘Scholar’s Mate’ opening (only learned what this was later on) and then oversaw my pieces being relentless ground down, finishing checkmated in a helpless position.

That concluded my first chess tournament – a day of extreme highs and lows. The lows are demoralising and exhausting, and picking yourself up after a disappointing defeat is so difficult. But oh my, the endorphin hit of those highs! As I weighed up all the experiences and emotions of the day, I knew I was not going to be one and done. I had caught the bug. I’ll be back…